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That has to do with the nature of services property taxes traditionally pay for. Inflation is not something that occurs evenly across all products and services. Flat screen TVs get cheaper, education goes up faster than inflation. Property taxes generally don’t pay for things that have productivity benefits over time (like large screen TVs) and do tend to pay for things that have higher than average rates of inflation (generally anything in the service sector that doesn’t get productivity gains from tech advances - not just education, but paying someone to care for the parks or snowplow the roads).
Hey, if someone were to look up the only A. Davison in Greenburg, NY and check the Zillow apppraised value of the home they’d find one valued at $572,576. If this is the case, maybe we’re not talking about stealing the widow’s mite here.
This sounds just like one of the rationalizations used by my city council people right after they asked for a sales tax increase to pay for street repair. The street repair was needed because the money from the budget that was supposed to be spent on street repair was used to upgrade a softball park; a project that the voters said “NO” to twice when they were asked for permission to issue bonds for the softball park.
The city council (largely driven by the mayor) went ahead with the project anyway using general funds, neglected street repair, and then asked for more tax money to repair the streets.
A couple of years later, they repeated this scam to build a water park. When the voters revolted, the mayor tried to blackmail everyone by closing the library. The mayor resigned in a huff and then, suddenly, the temporary mayor “found” the funds to reopen the library.
I’ll save the story about the “Law Enforcement Center” for another post.
This kind of crap has set my bullshit meter to a pretty low level when I hear someone trot out the “pay for teachers and cops” line. Funny how the additional school tax funds (mine have doubled in the last ten years) have never made it into the pockets of any of the teachers I know.
Oh, and by the way, why don’t you walk down your block and explain the uneven inflation theory to your elderly neighbors on a fixed income. I’m sure it will make them feel better.
My real beef with property taxes is that it is a “my way or highway” system here. You are assessed a value, and this value does not in any way take into account the marketability of the house, just what it could, potentially sell for, in a perfect world. For example - the fact that a house on a block sells for $200,000 is noted, and raises everyone else’s taxes - but the assessors say they are “not concerned” about the fact that the house stayed on the market for 14 months, and had its sale price reduced from $250,000 even to sell.
If you go into the assessors to complain, you have no real legal defense. Your only defense is if your house is somehow an outlier in your neighborhood, and it has to be an outlier by more than about 10%. Generally, they raise all assessments uniformly in a neighborhood, so that rarely happens.
They also take no notice, and are not allowed to consider, the structural state of the property. If your foundation is fucked and needs $40,000 of repair before you could sell the house, that’s not their problem. Your house is still worth the full, assessed value.
And here’s the ultimate capper - if you hire on your own dollar a professional assessor to certify the value of your house, that doesn’t mean anything. If you have a notarized and stamped document saying “this house is only worth $100,000, not $150,000” - they don’t care. It has no influence on their decision.
I’m firmly convinced that the primary job of the tax assessor here is:
- Open up a spreadsheet of all home values in the county.
- In a column, put “=HomeValue*(InflationRate*2)”
- Send out that result as the new assessment to 500,000 people.
This whole “pay for teachers and cops” argument is tired. If we looked at the local budgets, I’m sure there is a lot of fat to be cut in each of them.
It’s like if someone has a $500 per day cocaine habit, and you take away $10 from their allowance and they complain that they won’t be able to eat lunch now.
Much of government is like this; more than you’d realize, still getting things done isn’t cheap;
The cops need; cars and all the expenses associated with both outfitting and maintaining them, guns, ammunition, uniforms, office supplies, investigatory tools, computers etc.
Firefighters need trucks (which are anywhere from $100,000 to a million bucks) and all the expenses associated with outfitting and maintaining them, uniforms, gear, tools, a ‘house’ to ‘live’ in while they’re there 24 hours, office supplies etc.
Not to mention pay, which is the largest part of any budget, I’ll guarantee.
Now, you take all of the ‘stuff’ associated with operating a police and fire department, and assume it has a shelf life. Then realize that even if the tool or item or whatever gets little use, that at some point it will be of no use at all, and have to be sold at surplus or disposed of outright, and something else purchased to take its’ place.
The hard truth is that most things are already at the ‘lowest bidder’ status. Odds are that the men and women that protect you from the bad guy where you live aren’t getting dragonskin body armor, they’re getting Galls, good-enough body armor, because they’re the cheapest, or at least less costly. The firefighters that will save you from everything but the bad guy aren’t wearing globeNX bunkers that wear like a tracksuit, they’re getting morning pride or some other thing. This is a ‘most likely’ scenario, but i’d all but guarantee it.
My guess from your statement is when it comes to municipal budgeting you don’t know your ass from a tea kettle, which is OK, that’s probably not your deal, but the facts are that there are places you cut and there are places you don’t, cops, firemen, teachers (which are not usually paid by a municipality, FTR) are among those places you don’t.
The softball field example is one place you do.
I feel badly for the person in the OP, and there should be fair and constant increases in taxation every year to a cap, as opposed to giant lump-sum taxes with wild fluctuations. I’d rather pay half a percent a year for 20 years than 6 percent once and 3 percent another.
This is a tired old hand waving. If you think there is so much waste in local budgets, I’m sure you will have no problem posting cites. It is not common knowledge, so quit acting like it is.
I quite enjoyed one of the property tax schemes Heinlein proposed: You pay taxes on whatever self-assessed value you care to assign to your property. And you are required by law to sell for that price.
I have my doubts about its feasibility in the real world, but it sure does simply solve the vast majority of the problems we have with centrally planned tax assessment.
I’t’s been more than thirty years since I was involved in standard bred horse racing, but that’s how claiming races were run in New York. They ran, for example, a six thousand dollar claiming race, and if you entered your horse in that, and someone showed up with the six grand, they bought your horse. There was an additional allowance for mares, because of the breeding value, I think an extra $1000.
It kept people from sandbagging and showing up with some high priced horses to pick up cheap purses.
I live in Arlington, VA, a close-in, fairly affluent (for the most part) suburb of DC. My house is worth about the same as that old lady’s house. The taxes for my house are not even half what she’s getting taxed.
If I was living in the rural south, I would understand this disparity, but I’m pretty sure that the fact of the matter is that that old lady and everybody in her community is getting absolutely reamed by the taxman there. Her local goverment must all be on coke if they’re spending that much money.
…and I’m not some whiny right-wing taxophobe, either…seriously, WTF?
I didn’t say “waste” (even though there may be) I said “fat”. Things like homeless shelters and public transportation that may very well be good things, but are far less popular for most people.
When the county has to cut the budget, it is always “teachers and cops”. You never hear a commissioner say “If this tax cut passes, we will have to close three homeless shelters.”
Why? Because a lot of people would say “fine”. They pick the top priority of the county and the most popular programs and put them FIRST on the chopping block. It puts off the real debate as to whether the county needs more public parks, baseball fields, subsidized busses, and domestic violence shelters v. putting old people to work to pay their property taxes.
And I’m sure that we could pick out any county’s budget and come up with substantial cuts that we could all agree on, but will never happen because of the entrenched power network.
But that brings up another confusion aspect of the tax code: When you bought the house. In Florida, I pay four times the property tax on my home as my neighbor who has a nearly identical home.
Why? Because he bought his house ten years ago, and is capped under the “Save Our Homes” plan. It makes no sense. Does he use 1/4th of the county resources that I do? It’s another shell game. Instead of reducing property taxes across the board, they capped existing home owners to shut them up, and shove the issue away, but the problem still exists.
Local property taxes for seniors in Nebraska are paid out of the State treasury via a Homestead Exemption law that pays all of the senior’s local tax, provided that the house is below a certain assessed valuation AND the senior’s income is below a certain point.
My mother-in-law had to give up her home when an assessor valued her home@ over the $60,000 limit. This was in 2004 at the height of the "bubble"in real estate values.
The problem with the Homestead Exemption is that it is all or nothing. Make $1 over $12,400 OR have the assessor value your house at $60,001 and suddenly your taxes are $1800,not zero.
My useless State senator, who thinks her only purpose in life is sucking the local school superintendent’s dick (I might be speaking purely metaphorically here, but who knows?) doesn’t agree with me that oldsters should be eased back onto the local tax rolls, say by paying 10% of the total bill for every 10% or part thereof the property is valued above an inflation-adjusted 2007 $60,000–meaning ,of course that you end up with zero exemption @ $120K in inflation-adjusted dollars.
The same could be done with the income portion of the limit.
And,of course, you could change or to either/or so that the oldster with a $65,000 house whose $10,000 lotto windfall puts her @ $13,000 for the year can pay 20% of his/her taxes, not 100%.
As it stands now, whole neighborhoods have been ruined by slumlords paying lowball prices to low-income seniors who feel “taxed out of” their homes.
The poor-but proud older homeowner of that little 2-bedroom cottage who somehow kept the grass cut has been replaced by 10-12 illegals with old cars they never license all over the front lawn.
Maybe Madame (pronounced “ma-DAMNED”) State Senator is choking on a little packinghouse-management dick as well.
Well, there’s the fact that all we know about her tax situation is what she says, and that Zillow says the taxes on 6 Greenbriar Lane, which was valued at the $575,000 were $7,162 in 2005.
She may have been reassessed at the peak of the bubble, because the Zillow price graph on that property shows a huge jump in what looks like late 2004, to close to $950,000 which immediately dropped back to $600,000, which I assume is the real value of the house. If she got reassessed at the peak, she may well be paying on the $950M instead of the $600.
And of course, I have no way to know that this is actually her home, But those are the numbers for the house at that address.
One of the problems with rapidly growing communities is that when people move in and start paying taxes they cover their ongoing expenses, but not the capital costs of the infrastructure which has already been paid for by longer term residents. This leads to resentment by the old timers, and they call their legislators, and stupic plans like “Save our Homes”. It might be fair to assess a one time fee on incoming residents to cover capital costs, but I have no idea how to administer this.
Have you looked a a local budget? “Fat” like homeless shelters and public transportation are minuscule compared to public safety and education. Cuts in those areas would do nothing to significantly reduce property taxes.
So here’s a hypothetical question: Let’s say there’s a housing bubble in an area, where house values skyrocket, and assessed values go through the roof even if the house could not be sold for that. Then the bubble bursts. Do those assessments EVER go down? Do people EVER have their taxes backed down, or is that bill going to stay at the higher price forever? I think I know the answer, but it’s probably just cynicism speaking.
raises ignorant lil’ hand
I’ll admit that houses, property taxes, and mortgages are all foreign concepts to me. Then again, I’m 21 and not a lot of 21 year olds are well versed in the ways of the housing industry. Of course, someday soon I will know it all . … hopefully!
Anyway, I’m just curious if I’m right about this. In CA, your property taxes don’t change while the price of the house fluctuates, right? Like, your property taxes here are assessed based on what you paid for the house, yes?
It would work for me. I have no intention of selling my property, and no heirs*. So $1 it is!
- Since I don’t have to leave anything behind, I can just spend it all while alive, and have them toss my body into a mass hobo grave. Woo hoo!